Archives

Twitter

Meta

Blogroll

Tag: Linux

Title says it all. First I tried using Windows 8 on her and it kinda sorta worked… but it was just too much for the computer.

I tried Windows 7 and it worked without a hitch… before I actually installed software. Once I did, the system bogged down to the point where I would dread using it. Even youtube videos would bring the system to its knees.

Right now I’ve been using Linux Mint 14 Debian Edition without problems except the usual Pulseaudio bullshit, but that will require very smart minds to fix.

Northfield/Norwood isn’t about changing anything fundamentally with Wayland/Weston, but Moreau doesn’t like the pace of development within Wayland/Weston and it being bottlenecked at times by Kristian’s workload. Moreau is also more focused on just “desktop bling” and effects than low-level graphics subsystem work. Among the desktop effects he wants to bring over from Compiz into a Wayland compositor include the desktop cube, desktop wall, scale, wobbly windows, expo, and Emerald Theme support.

ThinkPad loyalists will almost certainly direct their attention to the new trackpad when first laying eyes on the T431s. Or, perhaps, they’ll spot the notable (and very deliberate) omission of the physical buttons that have historically sat just beneath and above a far smaller tracking surface. According to Parrish, the overall concept was to “simplify the appearance of two pointing devices in ThinkPad notebook design and maximize touchpad area — while optimizing it for interaction with Windows 8.” A tricky approach, no doubt, given that a solid swath of ThinkPad users have no doubt grown used to mousing with the crimson-clad, centrally located nub. The end result is a five-button clickpad, as it was detailed to me, which supports 20 gestures and handles northerly clicks for those who refuse to switch from using the aforementioned pointing stick.

So I guess Linux support is out? Right now I’m pissed at the desktop environment mess, but once the dust has settled, I’ll probably be going back. I’d like to go back to Linux on a Thinkpad, but if Lenovo chooses to block me from that, I’ll buy a computer from some other OEM that does let me.

By the pits of elemental chaos, I don’t know where to begin. I truly don’t. I’m typing this up trying to calm down after I was taken against my will on an odyssey of bad documentation, stupid changes and general assholery.

It all started with an innocuous aptitude update; aptitude upgrade. Package linux-image-3.2.0-4-686-pae refused to install properly, but that can be dealt with later. Reboot.

All hell breaks loose upon Xorg. All 2D/3D hardware acceleration is gone. Xrandr refuses to work and the most it can do is clone the displays, displaying the following error with a command that worked for years before today:
$ xrandr --output LVDS --auto --preferred --output VGA-0 --auto --preferred --right-of LVDS
xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1600x1200 (desired size 2680x1200)

Is it any wonder people are using sites like StackExchange as their first stop when trying to fix issues? Man pages refuse to evolve and more and more applications simply don’t provide them, telling you to go to their website when seeking help.

Anyway, back to Xorg. Installing the proprietary fglrx driver doesn’t work; the Radeon Mobility X1400 card on this Thinkpad T60 is not supported anymore. I could try apt pinning to get it to work… but Debian doesn’t really encourage its use. Purged the driver from the system.

Now I’ll have to do the one thing I really didn’t want to do. Setup a xorg.conf file manually. Switch to a VT (Ctrl+Alt+F1), uplift to root, Kill X (/etc/init.d/lightdm stop), issue X -configure. Get this error:
Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices.
Configuration failed.

Video performance is, hmm, how to describe it… quirky; I’m getting lots of drawing artifacts all over the place; CPU usage seems to come and go. Hell, the performance of iceweasel while typing this post leaves much to be desired. But now I’ve got a starting point from which to improve the situation.

Was any of this necessary? No. Would I have run into these issues if I were using Windows or OS X? Certainly not. The urge to leave Linux behind on the desktop and move back to Windows is becoming ever stronger. Windows 8 runs quite nicely on my Thinkpad X61t, and I don’t have to deal with forced changes to my desktop environment.

I’m tired of this. All of this. First Amarok 2 became a monster that still can’t compare with Amarok 1.4.x — Clementine does the job well enough, but really. Then GNOME 2 turned into GNOME 3, throwing into disarray the desktop environment landscape; people haven’t recovered and the alternatives aren’t working yet. Interacting with Android devices remains a pain in the ass. Interacting with iOS devices is basically impossible. The big companies are treating Linux like a third-class citizen.

Should I not be able to get performance to what it was before, I will be migrating back to Windows. I am not alone in this consideration. Right now a whole lot of people are migrating to OS X or Windows to avoid these headaches; they too are tired of having to fight the desktop in order to do real work.

Linux is victorious on the server and mobile spaces, but I now truly don’t expect it to remain more than a plaything for common desktop users. I hope to someday come back to the Linux fold but this won’t probably happen for a few years, when things have changed.

This here explains why a lot of stuff simply doesn’t work the way it used to: Xorg, NetworkManager, Pulseaudio. It also explains why no one outside of IT uses Linux for real-world software development; you don’t have to fight OS X to get started writing code. FreeBSD is almost there as well, with people switching over to it to avoid dealing with the eldritch abomination that is D-Bus.

Are FLOS proponents still butthurt by Microsoft? So much that they would turn the OS on top of Linux-the-kernel into a bad imitation of Windows?

Hi guys, I recently updated Arch and I got the new gtk3 stuff. All would be fine except for the fact that now, my gtk2 apps use a theme and the gtk3 ones use another (ugly) one. I searched the forum and I basically found that I should wait for gtk3 and gtk2 to become armonic or gtk2 apps use the gtk3 libraries

In short, KDE 4 is about one thing and one thing only: 3D rendered eye candy. If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get, in spades. But as a desktop, as a single, integrated, holistic sense of place and set of potentialities and operations that are intuitive, minimal, and streamlined and that support productivity, KDE 4 is an epic fail in a way that makes KDE 3 roll in its grave.

That specific comment states the plain truth about KDE4. I tried to run it on my trusty Thinkpad T60 for a few days, finding out it is basically unusable with compositing turned off. Turning it on makes it work too much for too little return; I couldn’t even listen to music on Grooveshark without the music slowing down!

I’ve been trying to get the damn Debian Wheezy installer to work via USB on a Thinkpad T60 for the past three days without any success. Sure, it works like a charm when put on a CD or a DVD and booting from there, but that is beside the point.

I’ve tried various methods I’ve found on the web and on the Debian wiki without avail. To use any of them, you need to fuck around with the terminal, or installing things (as in the case of unetbootin). As it is right now, most Linux installers still can’t easily be put on USB drives without fucking around on the command line and getting things wrong a few times.

I realize I’m just venting, but… really, it is now past mid-2012. Apple is selling its OS X via digital delivery. Microsoft is about to do the same with Windows 8, and did sell Windows 7 installers on USB drives.

Linux should have gotten there years ago, to make it easy for people to try it out and keep their files around with them. Instead, we have lots and lots of guides for “the perfect $LINUXDISTRO USB install”, all of which are outdated within a few months. This would have led to Linux spreading virally among the common user, instead of just staying in the nerd ghetto.

Combine this with motherboards implementing UEFI and Linux installers not supporting it, and the future is getting ever dimmer for “Linux on the desktop.” Next time someone says “This is the year of Linux on the desktop” I will laugh at them on their face.

The usual way printing works on Linux is by connecting your printer directly to your system, or printing through IPP. But what if you need to print to a printer connected to a Windows system?

Here is how to get it working while keeping fuss to a minimum. Once again, these instructions are made with Debian Squeeze in mind, so adjust them if you’re using a different distribution. I used Windows XP but I believe these instructions should also work for Vista and Windows 7.

In Windows, make sure the printer is shared.

Make note of the printer’s share name and the system’s hostname, viewable in System Properties (right-click the My Computer icon).

Install smbclient.

# aptitude install smbclient

In GNOME go to System/Administration/Printing. On the menu bar go to Server/New/Printer. You’ll probably have to provide your root password to continue.

Click “Network Printer”, then select “Windows Printer via SAMBA.”

On the right pane you’ll see a textbox to enter the address for the printer itself. Click Forward.

You have to enter both the Windows hostname and the printer’s share name, so you’d type something like mywindowspc/myprinter. Make sure you get the case right.

It is likely CUPS already has a working driver for your printer, so look for it on the list of drivers. If you want to provide a PPD file or look for another driver, you can also do that.

In my own case there were three available drivers for the printer, so I went with the one marked “recommended” by the wizard.

Assign a printer name, description, and location. You may have to re-enter your root password to save all settings.

Print a test page.

That should do the trick. If it doesn’t work you can try using another print driver. If that still doesn’t work, try looking for a Linux driver for your printer.

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 1 update-alternatives: using /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme to provide /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme (x-cursor-theme) in manual mode.

If you’re not using Debian, it seems the way to go is to follow /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme with the following:

[Icon Theme] Inherits=DMZ-Black

Either method sets the cursor theme systemwide through Xorg itself. To set it for a single user, add the following to ~/.Xdefaults:

Xcursor.theme: DMZ-Black Xcursor.size: SIZE #optional

In my own case, I was using the the DMZ-Black theme on GTK applications, but Qt3/Qt4 applications (Amarok 1.4, Clementine, Skype, KeepassX) had the mouse pointer switch to DMZ-White when it entered their windows. Nothing that would cause trouble, but annoying if you want a consistent look across your environment.

As said before, this avoids unnecesary cruft on your system and works for all desktop environments you might have on your system.

Here is how to setup Samba and GNOME Nautilus to allow user directory sharing without having to allow root access. These commands are made with Debian in mind, so if you want to use them for your Linux distribution, you’ll have to adapt them.

Install samba and nautilus-share.

# aptitude install samba nautilus-share

Rename your smb.conf to smb.conf.master

# cd /etc/samba # mv smb.conf smb.conf.master

Add the following to smb.conf.master somewhere under the [global] stanza using your favorite text editor.

This tests the samba master configuration file, then outputs the results to the file samba itself will use for its configuration. If it finds errors, it will warn you about them.

According to the Samba docs, a small smb.conf file improves performance. It also improves readability once you’re familiar with Samba options.

Restart samba.

# /etc/init.d/samba restart

Add your user to the sambashare group. If more people use the system and they need to share files, make sure to add them as well.

# useradd -G sambashare foo

Log out of your user session, then log back in.

On Nautilus, when you right-click directories you will now see a “Sharing options” item. Through this item you can:

Share the folder, assigning a share name.

Allow read/write access.

Enable Guest access, which allows people without a user account on the system to access the share.

This last option is the most useful as people can now get stuff through the network without having to deal with usernames or passwords. Does this make the Linux system behave like a Windows system? Yes, it does.

There is something to be said, however, about the convenience of creating shares without having to muck around the smb.conf.master file whenever you want to make a change.

So it seems cablemas decided to block DNS requests (port 53) going out of their network. I’m not sure if they’re doing this at the network level — which would be extremely stupid on their part — or by reconfiguring their modem. Either way this means:

Cannot use OpenDNS or Google Public DNS for domain resolution.

I’m forced to use Cablemas DNS servers. They are very, very slow. Most lookups are above 20s, with 30s-40s latency being common.

Since DNS queries take long to resolve, internet connectivity is slow as hell. Enter DNS caching (DNS proxy).

Most DNS servers can do caching on the side (BIND, djbdns, dnsmasq) without too much additional work. The problem is most of the time the cache disappears when the computer is rebooted. If your system is a server, you’re fine. But what if you’re on a laptop or a desktop? It’s no good having a cache if you have to rebuild it every day.

There isalso the fact the electric system in Mexico isn’t the best, so often computers go down hard when the electricity fails. UPS units are expensive to put them on a single desktop computer.

So that’s when I discovered pdnsd. It’s a light DNS proxy that can act as a caching system, working on localhost to speed up queries.

Being on Debian Sid, all I had to do to install it was

# aptitude install pdnsd

When asked which mode to use, I chose ‘manual’. When it was done I added my ISP’s DNS servers like so to /etc/pdnsd.conf

You’re free to use other DNS resolvers like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS obviously. The caching will work regardless of what upstream server does the actual resolving.

Then set it up so it runs on boot by editing /etc/default/pdnsd

This sets up the daemon to work; you still have to set up your network interfaces to make use of the cache. In my own case my system is getting an IP address from the cablemodem itself dynamically, so I had to edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and enable the prepend domain-name-servers directive:

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1

If you’re setting manually via /etc/network/interfaces, you’ll have to manually edit /etc/resolv.conf so your local DNS is queried first.

Once everything is done, bring down the interface (eth0 in my case):

# ifdown eth0

Then bring it back up:

# ifup eth0

I’m pretty sure it’d be same for wlan interfaces. This should be more useful on laptops or systems that connect to networks of unknown quality.

This all goes to show Cablemas is one of the worst ISPs around and you should avoid it like the plague.

Used version 1.2.0, which is the one currently being offered as stable. The application itself takes some extra work to get it going since it’s a XUL application. There are pre-built Ubuntu packages which you don’t get from the developers themselves, but rather from third parties who offer them. This means you have to trust these packagers when performing the installation.

The program doesn’t integrate into the desktop environment at all either. Sure, you can install “feathers” (skins) on it, but if you like a unified look across all your applications you’re out of luck. It can’t be that hard to use system bindings, surely.

Any playlists imported into it need to be coded in ANSI (ISO-8859-15). If you try to import anything in UTF-8 you will get lots and lots of ghost songs in the database. In my case I ended up with 4K ghost songs in a library of 13.4K songs. All these songs would have to be rated again. Screw that.

Now, here’s the kicker. It likes to eat RAM like a legislator takes money out of the public treasury, often going into the hundreds of megabytes of RAM usage.

Gotta keep looking for a decent music player. There’s gotta be something comparable to Winamp at the very least.

After my update to Karmic Koala I found myself in need of a new music player, specially after using the godsforsaken mess that is Amarok 2. In my search for a new music player for Linux I happened to find Exaile. It describes itself thusly:

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

It takes a lot of inspiration from Amarok 1.4 in its layout and design choices and since it’s written in GTK you don’t have to install any KDE dependencies.

Even though it’s up to version 3.0.2 at the time of this writing, it should be considered alpha software. Beta at the most:

Playlist import/export doesn’t really work. You can import only from M3U playlists and export to XSPF playlists. The other choices don’t work.

Overuse of playlist tabs.

Most plugins don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

On the plus side, the developers offer a repository for it, so you don’t have to jump through hoops like you do when you want to use SongBird.

After attempting to use it for a couple of days, I’ve decided it’s not for me. Hopefully I’ll get SongBird working without too many problems.

I’ve only tried to get a headset to work on my computer with Skype. Had to fiddle with settings for an hour before Skype worked the way it was supposed to. Mind you, this is a cheap-ass run-of-the-mill headphones-and-microphone headset without any controls; none of those nifty USB headsets for me because I know they do not work with my choice of operating system.

All of those APIs, sound servers, systems and daemons… they’re Augean cattle mucking up the stable, and they need to be slaughtered and the stable cleaned out. Perhaps Mr. Shuttleworth is up to the job.

Sound on Linux? It is completely broken; whenever you see articles announcing “This is the year of Linux on the desktop”, please proceed to abuse the author to no end.

I say this all as a Linux user — both at home and at work — and as someone who pushes open source software on everyone. Guess I’ll have to stop doing that and push people towards Apple instead.